Tag: war

The Libyan rebels get a little more air support than they’d bargained for:

A NATO-led air strike killed 13 Libyan rebels, a rebel spokesman said on Saturday, but their leaders called for continued raids on Muammar Gaddafi’s forces despite the “regrettable incident.” NATO has conducted 363 sorties since taking over command of the Libya operations on March 31, and about 150 were intended as strike missions but NATO has not confirmed hitting any targets.

One wonders how many non-combatants have been killed by these so-called surgical strikes. I tend to suspect that the Libyans who are neither regime nor rebel supporters are probably less inclined to be as forgiving of such collateral damage as the rebel forces are.

Justin Raimondo notes an admission by Mr. Obama and explains why the USA is now invading its third Moslem nation in ten years:

Like all US wars since the Revolution, this one is about the internal politics of the US, rather than a real external threat to our security. The Clintonian wing of the Democratic party is determined to regain power, and Hillary’s push for war is the spearhead of the Restoration. The Clintonites are determined to outflank the Republican party in the foreign policy field, and eliminate the Democrats’ alleged “national security deficit” once and for all, albeit while swathed in a penumbra of moral righteousness.

The Republicans, who have presided over the most aggressive expansion of the American empire since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, are in no position to criticize this new crusade in the Middle East. They do so with the albatross of Iraq weighing heavily around their necks. Politically, it’s win-win for the Democrats, as they gear up to save what remains of their hold on power.

It is certainly amusing to see how Republicans and conservatives are contorting themselves into political pretzels, trying to explain why Iraq and Afghanistan were necessary defenses of American national security while Libya is not, while simultaneously attempting to claim that they are the champions of fiscal restraint and small government. The Pauls, Ron and Rand, are among the few sane Republicans these days, which no doubt is why they are considered “unelectable” and “crazy” by the conservative media.

Surely if Americans just keep killing Arab civilians, the people will eventually come to love democracy:

Soldiers Jeremy Morlock and Andrew Holmes had spotted a young farmer working by himself. Gul Mudin, 15 – only four years younger than Holmes – was the only Afghan in sight, had no weapons on him and had a ‘welcoming’ face. Nobody else was around.

Gul walked towards them when called and stopped when asked. Morlock tossed a grenade at him, using the wall as cover, then both soldiers opened fire. Gul fell face down into the ground and there was soon a pool of blood coming out from his head. Morlock screamed over the radio that he had come under attack, but Adam Winfield told his fellow soldier Ashton Moore that it was more likely a staged killing.

Morlock and Holmes told a sergeant that Gul had been about to attack them with a grenade and they therefore had to shoot him, reported the magazine. The story of a lone Taliban fighter, with one grenade attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, seemed unlikely to top officer Captain Patrick Mitchell.

But he told Staff Sergeant Kris Sprague to ‘make sure’ Gul was dead. Sprague fired his rifle twice at the boy.

A local elder working nearby in the poppy fields came over and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder, but he was ignored by the soldiers. This elder was asked to identify the boy, but it tragically turned out that he was his dad. ‘The father was very upset,’ an official Army report noted.

The soldiers followed Army protocol of cutting off the dead boy’s clothes and stripping him naked to check for tattoos, before scanning his iris and fingerprints. But then they began taking photographs of them celebrating the kill, with Holmes posing for the camera by grabbing Gul’s head by the hair as if he was a deer.

One should not be surprised when soldiers, who are trained to kill people, kill people. That’s what soldiers tend to do, regardless of how well they are trained. They are not very effective at tasks that do not involve breaking things and killing people, which is why using them to establish democracy or make foreign populations love America is unlikely to be a successful strategy.

Clearly the Egyptian anti-Mubarak movement almost exactly reflects the left-liberal secularism of their most enthusiastic supporters in the USA:

Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahrir Square earlier this month.

After army officers violently cleared the square of protesters on 9 March, at least 18 women were held in military detention. Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges.

It is obviously complete madness to conclude that the Ikhwan has any connection to the mass uprising of democratic people power in Egypt.

Back in November 2008, just before Obama was elected, I declared: “you know that between Zimbabwe, Kenya, and the Congo, a President Obama is going to invade Africa one way or another.”

But he’s running out of time and obviously Obama is not invading Libya, he is merely engaging in kinetic action there. I’m not sure which is more amusing, all of the usual doubletalk meant to indicate that engaging in acts of war is not warfare or the contortions with which Obama’s most liberal supporters are attempting to excuse their erstwhile peace candidate as he not only continues Bush’s two wars, but launches a third one.

But I know what is more amusing still… the neocons’ new fears that their World Democratic Revolution blueprint, which involves making use of the UN to sideline the U.S. Congress and justify attacking anyone the neocons want to attack, could lead to a US attack on Israel if utilized by the new Arab democrats in the Middle East.

All of which goes to underline the inherent wisdom in pre-WWI American isolationism. Wars may be wildly profitable to some, but they reliably lead to circumstances that are unforeseen by even the most perspicacious profiteers.

RCA hasn’t been paying much attention since 1945:

You are wrong [in reference to my most recent WND column, The Third Bush Term.] The peoples of the world’s various nations no longer want to be ruled by dictators! Period. They want freedom. Period. The United Nations SHOULD be in the business of intervening when a dictator uses its might to kill its people.

That is my take. Where am I wrong?

Where to start? I told him the two fundamental errors he made in an email. But rather than spelling them out here, I imagine most of you can identify them rather easily.

Somehow, I doubt that the third time will prove the charm:

U.S. and British warships have reportedly launched the opening salvo of the intervention in Libya — called Operation Odyssey Dawn — firing some 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Qaddafi anti-air defenses, mostly on the coast of Western Libya and extending between Tripoli and Benghazi. Word is that U.S. AFRICOM will run the first few days of the operation in an effort to “shape the battlefield” before turning over command to another member of the coalition.

The initial launch also included the launching of American electronic warfare aircraft.

Nothing spells decline and fall like a bankrupt, demographically dying empire getting entangled in one unnecessary military conflict after another.

UPDATE – This is certainly an amusing development: A hard-core group of liberal House Democrats is questioning the constitutionality of U.S. missile strikes against Libya, with one lawmaker raising the prospect of impeachment during a Democratic Caucus conference call on Saturday.

I told you that the Democratic elders want to get rid of Obama a while ago. There is absolutely no way they want him leading them into the 2012 electoral campaign. And it would be absolutely hilarious to see Democrats leading the impeachment charge against this lamest of first-term lame ducks.

The Tripoli Trap

It is not hard to understand why the idea of military intervention in support of the Libyan rebels battling against the Gadhafi regime is tempting to some Americans. Responsible for both the Lockerbie bombing and the Berlin disco bombings that killed both American soldiers and civilians, there is little that is not reprehensible about Muammar Gadhafi. Nor has there ever been even a pretense of democratic legitimacy about the government of The Brother Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which came to power in a conventional third-world “colonel’s coup” in 1969.